In My Opinion, Opinions Suck

So here I am, sitting at my computer with my first cold of the season. What have I been doing with myself all day you ask? Surfin' the net and watching cheesy action movies.

I've come across a lot of seriously inspiring aikido clips on sites such as YouTube, but I've decided to stop reading the comments sections just because it's impeding my rate of recovery by a factor of ten. Giving yourself a headache brought on by disbelief in the ignorance and egotism of other people tends to help a head cold drag on and on rather than hinder it.

I really have very little tolerance for people in other martial arts who view aikido objectively (obviously, since they don't do aikido) and try to interpret the effectiveness of what they're seeing. But what's worse, there are so many people WITHIN the aikido community who do the same. The word "effective" has such a broad meaning that I guess that needs clarifying as well, so here goes (with my own opinion...which also probably sucks).

Aikido is based on sword techniques. Most aikidoists dabble in, or seriously undertake, some sort of sword art to complement and/or supplement their aikido training. For me personally, "effective" aikido should be interchangeable with effective swordsmanship. This principle holds (a lot of... by which I mean freakin' oceans of) water, since Osensei taught swordsmanship to many of his closest students as a way of imparting aikido's true fundamentals. Aikidoists who approach their training from a grappling, pinning perspective are missing something wholly basic and essential from their training.

Now that we've established that fact, let's return to the original issue. There are hundreds of thousands of aikidoists scattered across the globe, and everyone has their own way of moving and shaking. The fundamental techniques are, for the most part, the same from place to place. It's clear that everyone begins their aikido training for different reasons, and more often than not, the reasons for sticking with aikido in the long run differ greatly from those initial reasons. One thing is for certain though, people who start training to learn self defense either quit early on, or change their outlook immediately. Aikido is not effective in the short run, and very few people even in the advanced stages of aikido could safely say that what they're doing would be effective "on the street." (This issue is so idiotic, childish, and almost vulgar to me that even writing about it in this post is making me upset.)

Many aikidoists refer to their training as paralleling some sort of religious belief. It's something that they hold so sacred that they never even think about its "effectiveness." Aikido is a lifelong study, so it should have a deeper, much more personal meaning rather than just being about what's "effective." If you want to learn something effective, join the marines. If you're such an expert in aikido, then you should know that the people you're watching in that YouTube video are probably concerned about something other than "effective" aikido, and therefore, you should stop the shit kicking and google Tae Kwon Do board break demos instead.

If you walked into an aikido dojo, laughed at what you saw, challenged everyone in the dojo to a fight, beat the snot out of everyone in the room, and then walked home thinking "I showed those stupid aikido bastards," what would you have accomplished? Do you think the aikidoists you creamed would be thinking, "Man, our aikido isn't effective at all. We should stop doing aikido?" Or maybe they would think, "I feel sorry for that loser asshole who thought beating us up would prove a point. At least I enjoy what I do with my life, unlike that guy."

This boils down to that same old schoolyard argument that goes something like this: "MY book bag is cooler than YOUR book bag!" Yeah, great. But you know what? At the end of the day, we both somehow manage to get our books home regardless of your monopolization of "cool."